The purpose of this invention is to present a computerized programmable interactive Arabic language teaching device to help Arabic speaking children and adults to learn the basics of the Arabic language and recitation of Qur'an. The invention is also a very powerful self-teaching machine of Arabic language for non-Arab children and adults. The invention familiarizes the user with the different versions of the Arabic letters and their modifiers, enables the user to hear the correct Arabic letters and their sounds, and exercise spelling; teaches Arabic grammer, reading sentences and stories, and the Qur'anic recitaton rules. The invention has potential market in the Middle-East as well as all over the world as hundreds of millions of muslims learn the recitation of Qur'an and the basics of the Arabic language as part of their religion. With the addition of such sectors of the world-wide market, hundreds of thousands of sets may be marketed. In the U.S.A and Canada alone a market of at least 30 thousand pieces is predicted. Although the invention may sound similar in function to some English teaching toys, this invention in fact utilizes a unique design and theory of operation to accomodate the particular requirements of the Arabic Language and its phonetics. In the first place, the Alpha numeric keyboard with its 50 to 70 keys of multi-names and functions, which confuses even the experts, is eliminated. On the other hand the Arabic language is similar to the French in the sense that modifiers or accents like "'", "w", "o", "''" over and under the letters modify the pronunciation of words and their meaning, hence these modifiers should be shown for proper pronunciation of words. The Arabic text is always written from right to left in a connected form. Writing in discrete letters as in English is not acceptable. Moreover, the Arabic letters are graphic-type and can not be accomodated in multi-segments display. Even fixed dot matrices sabotage the symmetry of the Arabic letters and produce poor quality font. The invention utilizes a variable width dot matrix technique to generate high quality Arabic fonts suitable for the Qur'anic script. The synthesis of the Arabic words is based on a set of allophones and syllables developed by the inventor as a result of almost two years of research work on linear prediction coding of Arabic speech and phonetics.
The teaching procedure implemented in this invention has been selected after deliberate consultation with many experts and institutions in the Arabic language education, and after reference to many literatures on the phonetics of the recitation of Qur'an, and the modern techniques of language teaching. In this invention we describe the details of a preferred embodiment. For ultimate convenience and simplicity of operation, the embodiment utilizes a TV set to provide a voice channel and a low-cost colorful large display area, a simple hand-held remote keyboard, and plug-in solid state software modules.
The disclosure below will discuss the forms of the Arabic letters and modifiers, the phonetics of the Arabic language, some rules of pronunciation, and how they infulence the device structure from the point of view of the hardware and software implementation. There follows a general description of the invention and its operation procedure. The remainder of the disclosure is devoted to the detail description of the hardware, the data structure, and the internal operations.